Democratized superintelligence is coming: The world needs to get ready

Lucia Rahilly (0:03)

Roberta, great to see you.

Roberta Fusaro (0:05)

Lucia, always great to see you.

Lucia Rahilly (0:07)

So it's been a challenging couple of weeks for AI in the media. Society is asking some tough questions about super-intelligent AI and its influence on how we work, and how we will work in the future.

Roberta Fusaro (0:25)

Very far into the future, we hope, right?

Lucia Rahilly (0:27)

Hopefully, hopefully.

So today's episode is super-timely. We have Bret Taylor, who is actually the Chairman of OpenAI in conversation with Eric Kutcher, our North America Chair. Bret is also the co-founder and CEO of Sierra, which helps companies build sophisticated AI agents.

Roberta Fusaro (0:50)

Yeah, and you know, Lucia, what I found really interesting about this conversation is that Bret is both very optimistic about what AI can do, but also incredibly realistic about the concerns associated with AI development. And in this conversation, we hear about all of it. We hear about cybersecurity, frontier labs versus open weight models, and the topic that everyone can't get enough of, and that's data centers.

Lucia Rahilly (1:18)

It's a great discussion. Let's get into it.

Eric Kutcher (1:29)

I am joined today by a man who has many titles. He's a friend, but he's also the founder and CEO of Sierra AI, and also chairman of OpenAI, if I remember that correctly.

Bret Taylor (1:42)

That's right.

Eric Kutcher (1:43)

Amazing. So it's great to have you here with me, Bret Taylor, just truly wonderful and can't wait to have this conversation.

Bret Taylor (1:50)

Thanks for having me.

Eric Kutcher (1:51)

I was at a dinner last night, and I was asked about this moment, and I said, this is the most exciting moment that any of us will get to live through and lead through, and you are at the center of it. So I'd just love to hear a little bit, how do you think about the moment we're in, the things that excite you most, and maybe a little bit of the things that might even frighten you a little bit.

Bret Taylor (2:11)

Yeah. I think we're in a very significant moment in technology, this current generation of artificial intelligence.

It fundamentally, first, I mean, just in really simple terms, it's changed the way we interact with technology. But more than anything, because these models support basic reasoning, they're enabling computers to reason about ambiguous tasks and actually autonomously complete work. We're seeing that impact on the economy in the short-term with things like software engineering and coding agents, customer experience, both customer service and sales. We are in the foothills of artificial general intelligence. We've already seen recent models prove unproven math conjectures, or in some case disprove some of those math conjectures. I think in the domain of information, where digital technology is all that's required, we are probably already at a point of having super-intelligent AI, and I think we'll have a huge impact on science, a huge impact on the digital economy. That's why software engineering has been impacted already. I think everyone in the world will have access to a super-intelligent financial advisor, they'll have access to the world's greatest primary care physician. Every kid in this world will have access to a personalized tutor. I think it will be amazing. So I think the other part of this is I think we're going to end up over the next few years seeing the digital parts of the economy dramatically impacted and the rest not. It's going to create a lot of complexity when you end up with sort of more of an overhang in some industries than the other.

And then on the risk side, I think in the short term, cybersecurity is probably the biggest most acute concern because just like the early days of the internet, we often invent these technologies and the world's industries are not necessarily equipped to deal with the security ramifications yet. I think we're in a period of sort of societal vulnerability.

Eric Kutcher (4:06)

Let's come back to cyber because I think that is a very real risk and I think you have a question you can say, I tend to agree with you that this will be better in the long run. I can think of many reasons why, but the short run getting through that will be difficult. One of the things that you hear a lot about is, there's lots of individual productivity, but there isn't necessarily institutional level productivity that we can measure yet. We see that in the client work we do.

My articulation of this has been, it's an 80 percent business problem and 20 percent technology problem, and that the technology is first of all more advanced than what we can really use it for, as we think about redesigning these processes. Secondly, it is democratized, so it's already being embedded in ways that we don't even fully understand. There's a series of real workflows that you are trying to help your clients, your customers reimagine. How is that going?